Ari Freilich of The San Francisco-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence said:

States with weak gun laws and no (universal) background check requirement are a major source of crime guns here in California. Though California law regulates the importation of firearms from out of state, unscrupulous individuals can too easily obtain firearms in neighboring states without a background check and bring those firearms into California.

What Freilich overlooked is that ATF figures show that only roughly 11 percent of the guns used in crime in 2014 were from Arizona, Nevada, or Texas. The Daily News reports that 21,267 guns were recovered in 2014, only 2,452 of which were from Arizona, Nevada, or Texas. That means 18,815 of the guns were acquired under California’s highly restrictive gun control system.

For this reason, California Rifle and Pistol Association’s Chuck Michel says Obama’s executive gun controls are not going to impact crime in California. Rather, the new controls will simply serve to “harass” law abiding citizens who now have more hoops to jump through before acquiring the guns they need for self-defense in other states.

Michel said, “It’s not going to stop a criminal from getting [a gun], and it sure as hell isn’t going to stop a terrorist from getting one. They’ll steal it or smuggle it in from Mexico or get someone else to buy it for them.”

Ironically, the San Bernardino attackers used the very method Michel outlines. Syed Farook passed background checks to acquire the handguns used in the attack, while he and Tashfeen Malik availed themselves of AR-15s that had been legally purchased by someone else who passed a background check.